The confusion started after an e-mail began circulating which suggested that fraudsters had put a fake Westpac site online in order to purloin customer's online banking passwords.
"These fraudsters are telling customers they have to log on and change their pins and passwords. Last week they hit the CBA and they have now started on Westpac," it said.
The confusion arises from a non-Westpac owned page registered at www.westpac-bank.com.
"Go to www.westpac-bank.com, you will have to wait a few seconds while they pretend to divert you to westpac.com.au but they actually don't," the email said.
The confusion seems to have stemmed from the fact that after the Web site did in fact divert to the www.westpac.com.au Web site, the person who had coded the non-Westpac page used HTML tags that resulted the original www.westpac-bank.com domain name being preserved in the address bar of any browser.
ZDNet Australia examined the HTML source of the "menace" site and found nothing suspicious in it whatsoever. The line of HTML source code below shows beyond any doubt that as of 5pm Thursday, when the source was captured, the redirection was indeed occurring.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5"; url=http://www.Westpac.com.au" >;
Furthermore, all "fake" Westpac pages were being served directly from Westpac themselves, which was news to them. This is easily verified by right clicking on the site's main page, selecting "properties" and looking at the "address" field.
A spokeswoman for Westpac told ZDNet Australia the company still believed the site was in fact serving up a duplicate of the real Westpac site.
Widely circulated and sensational reports seem to have originated from a technical misunderstanding.
"A prank website, apparently operating on an Internet Service Provider located in the United States, provides an exact replica of the real Westpac site," reports have said.
As of 5pm Thursday, this was incorrect.
According to the bank, at no stage was any Westpac information at risk, even if passwords were indeed entered after a redirection from www.westpac-bank.com.
The bank said it is trying to have the site taken down.
"The bank has taken action to have the site shut down via the Australian Federal Police," it said in a statement.
The Australian Federal Police were unable to comment at the time of writing and were thus unable to clarify which law, if any, has been broken by the owners of the westpac-bank.com domain.
